"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Memo to media: Republicans have also failed to pass budgets The Drudge Report is hyping a report stating that "Democratic leaders called off votes and even debates on all controversial matters" and that "Congress is bolting for the campaign trail without finishing its most basic job -- approving a budget." But Republican congressional majorities have also previously failed to a pass budget resolution. Read More

Fox News vs. Glenn Beck A recent report detailed growing tension between Fox News and its most famous on-air personality, Glenn Beck, and cited complaints by Fox president Roger Ailes of "Beck's hawking his non-Fox ventures too much on his Fox show." Fox News journalists are reportedly "worried about the prospect that Beck is becoming the face of the network." Read More

Yesterday we learned -- or she claimed -- that an impostor had, years ago, plotted to build a phony Linkedin profile for her which included all correct information, albeit with seriously padded educational info, friended people she knows and vice versa, all to damage her during this political campaign.

Now the same impostor has apparently struck again on zoominfo.com. And this time the impostor was able to get O'Donnell herself to 'claim' and confirm the same padded educational info, in some sort of plan -- equal parts nefarious and ingenious -- to implicate her in serial bamboozling. And by 'padded', I mean in the sense of saying you went to school at places you didn't.

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Fox & Friends completely wrong on measures to stimulate the economy Reporting on proposals to extend a stimulus program which benefited unemployed workers, Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson quoted Republicans to ask "when will the Obama administration turn off government spending and extend tax cuts to stimulate the private sector?" But economists agree that programs such as extending unemployment insurance have a far greater stimulative effect on the economy than extending the tax cuts, which may damage the economy in the long run. Read More

He "deserve[s] a Pulitzer": Right-wing media previously showered O'Keefe with praise James O'Keefe made a name for himself in 2009 with his deceptively edited, secretly recorded, and now discredited ACORN videos. Since then, he has pleaded guilty to entering Sen. Mary Landrieu's Louisiana office under false pretenses. Now reports say that O'Keefe attempted to "punk" a CNN reporter by luring her onto a boat "filled with sexually explicit props" and recording the encounter. Media Matters looks back at the praise conservatives have previously heaped on O'Keefe. Read More

The Lies of James O'Keefe CNN reports that conservative activist James O'Keefe attempted to "punk" a CNN reporter by luring her onto a boat "filled with sexually explicit props" and recording the encounter, a charge O'Keefe denies. If true, the alleged deception would be the latest in a string of lies and falsehoods O'Keefe has used to push his ideological agenda. Read More

Conservatives respond to alleged O'Keefe seduction "prank" Conservative media figures have begun to speak out about CNN's report that James O'Keefe planned to "seduce" and publicly humiliate CNN reporter Abbie Bourdeau. A number of conservatives have condemned O'Keefe, while Tim Graham of NewsBusters used the story as an opportunity to attack CNN. Read More

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Fox wrongly blames increased health care costs on health care reformFox & Friends falsely suggested that a projected 12 percent increase in out-of-pocket health care costs for the coming year was due to provisions of health care reform. In fact, as the Chicago Tribune reported, the increase of costs is primarily due to advances in medical technology and changes in the workforce demographics due to the economic downturn. Read More

Obama is right: Fox News promoting "destructive" GOP agenda In a recent Rolling Stone interview, President Obama said Fox News is part of the tradition of using the press "very intentionally to promote their viewpoints" because Fox "has a very clear, undeniable point of view" that "is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth" of the country. Indeed, Fox has a long history of actively promoting the Republican agenda and of opposing economic positions which economists say would stimulate growth. Read More

The right-wing media's selective outrage over Nazi references Right-wing media have criticized comments by NAACP President Ben Jealous in which he discussed "all the hatred" in the media and said that "this is too much like the period before Kristallnacht." But right-wing media figures have a long history of attacking progressives by comparing them and their policies to Adolf Hitler, Nazis, or Nazi-era Germany.Read More

Glenn Beck's Apocalypse for Dummies Glenn Beck has said that he is "not a prophet," but he "can see what's coming at us" and "we've never fought anything like the perfect storm that is coming to shore." Media Matters compiles Beck's advice on how to survive the "cataclysmic change" headed our way. Read More

Republican U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul belongs to a conservative doctors’ group that, among other things, has expressed doubts about the connection between HIV and AIDS and suggested that President Barack Obama may have been elected because he was able to hypnotize voters.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, based in Tucson, Ariz., advocates conservative and free-market solutions on health care and a variety of other political issues.

But it also uses its medical journal and Website as forums for unorthodox medical views.

Rand Paul, a Bowling Green ophthalmologist, has touted his credentials as a doctor during this year’s Senate race against Attorney General Jack Conway, a Democrat.

In his first television ad of the general election campaign, Rand Paul is pictured in hospital scrubs and a white lab coat.

Speaking to the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons’ annual conference last October in Nashville, Paul said he has been a member of the group since at least 1990.

“I use a lot of AAPS literature when I talk,” he told the group.

Rand Paul’s campaign declined to answer questions about whether he supports the association’s positions. Instead, it highlighted the group’s opposition to abortion and to Democratic initiatives, including Obama’s health care law.

“Dr. Paul is member of AAPS because they believe that any health care reform should be market-oriented and embrace more freedom, not more government,” Jesse Benton, Paul’s campaign manager, said in a statement...........................

Such as Big Autism or Big Colonoscopies or Big Pregnant Women, perhaps?

That last one may be politically incorrect, but it is political correctness Angle cited last month in a speech to the Association of Health Underwriters on August 10 in explaining her opposition to mandates on insurance companies.

Recent revelations about Angle's disdain for mandates -- her vote against including colon cancer screenings and her deriding autism coverage -- reflect a consistent belief that government should not tell insurance companies what they have to cover. I suppose, on the day that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is here promoting health care reform, that opposition would include mandating insurers not boot folks for having pre-existing conditions.

Here's a transcription of what Angle said and the audio is at right:

“We know that if we could have that affordability across state lines, you’re not, you’re not afraid of competition I know you’re not, you would in fact invite it. I have friends in other states that say “you know I’d like to come to Nevada, but you have problems there in Nevada. And one of the problems is unfunded, well they are unfunded, but these mandates on insurance companies to provide coverage for things that people don’t even really need! And what we need to do is get rid of those mandates, let you provide a comprehensive coverage that takes care of what people need and allows them to buy them the things that they have to have, not things that are mandated by the government. A similar policy, as the things that people write for car insurance, and life insurance, you know you write something that fits the need of a person rather than fitting what the government has done for some politically correct special interest and that’s how we got those mandates.”..................

Sunday, September 26, 2010

This week the Republican Party (1,3) makes the foolish mistake of actually saying what they're going to do if they get elected -- and it's all John Boehner's (2,7) fault! Elsewhere, Susan Collins (5) and Rand Paul (6) teach us all about fairness, and Christine O'Donnell (10) has a plan to... well, you'll see.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward reports that there is “pretty widespread” discontent inside the GOP caucus with the recently-released “Pledge to America,” citing the document’s omission of an earmarks ban and its regurgitation of many health reform elements contained in the Affordable Care Act. But, Ward reports, the House GOP leadership was able to restrain much of the internal consternation among its members by circulating a positive editorial written by the National Review.

In the editorial titled “We’ll Take The Pledge,” the National Review editors lauded the document as being “bolder” than the Contract for America. The editorial also called the Pledge “compelling,” “praiseworthy,” and “a shrewd political document.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Republican sources told the Daily Caller that the GOP leadership colluded with the National Review in prearranging the editorial:

Two high-level Republican sources said that the National Review editorial had been prearranged, however, by Neil Bradley, a top leadership aide who is close to April Ponnuru, the executive director of the National Review Institute, and Kate O’Beirne, NRI’s president.

“It was a political blowjob,” one Republican aide said of the National Review editorial.

Bradley denied the accusation: “The assertion that I ‘prearranged’ the National Review editorial, or any editorial, is 100 percent false,” he said.

O’Beirne also denied the allegation, calling it “absolutely, categorically false.

In his weekly address, President Obama ripped the “Pledge to America.” “It is grounded in the same worn out philosophy: cut taxes for millionaires and billionaires; cut the rules for Wall Street and the special interests; and cut the middle class loose to fend for itself. That’s not a prescription for a better future. It’s an echo of a disastrous decade we can’t afford to relive,” he said.

In the furor surrounding the passage of Arizona's notorious immigration crackdown bill, one incident that heavily inflamed the debate was the shooting of Pinal County Deputy Louie Puroll, who was allegedly shot by gang of drug smugglers he was tracking in the desert. Puroll reported being ambushed by the drug smugglers and then engaged in a running gun battle in which was grazed by a bullet in the back.

Now though two renowned forensic pathologists are saying that Puroll's wound was clearly suffered at point-blank range and thus, quite possibly, self-inflicted as part of an effort to create a cause celebre to rally anti-immigrant forces in the state.

TPM readers will be familiar with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, as the sheriff from John McCain's 'danged fence' TV ad.

President Barack Obama's health care overhaul has divided the nation, and Republicans believe their call for repeal will help them win elections in November. But the picture's not that clear cut.

A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should stay out of health care by 2-to-1.

"I was disappointed that it didn't provide universal coverage," said Bronwyn Bleakley, 35, a biology professor from Easton, Mass.

More than 30 million people would gain coverage in 2019 when the law is fully phased in, but another 20 million or so would remain uninsured. Bleakley, who was uninsured early in her career, views the overhaul as a work in progress.

The poll found that about four in 10 adults think the new law did not go far enough to change the health care system, regardless of whether they support the law, oppose it or remain neutral. On the other side, about one in five say they oppose the law because they think the federal government should not be involved in health care at all.............................

Friday, September 24, 2010

Last fall we launched Project 10^100, a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. Your response was overwhelming. Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 (or around 10^5.2) ideas, from general investment suggestions to specific implementation proposals. As we reviewed these submissions, we started noticing lots of similar ideas related to certain broad topics, and decided that combining the best aspects of these individual proposals would produce the most innovative approaches to solving some very pressing problems.

Voting is complete. We'll announce the winning big ideas in the near future.

Make government more transparent

Community

Create a website that enables people from any country or municipality to easily learn about the workings of their government, and rally their fellow citizens to take action to improve it. Numerous user ideas embraced variations on the theme of governmental transparency, with specific proposals ranging from publishing details of proposed laws and politicians' voting records to making public budgets searchable online and leveraging social networks to let communities make their voices heard by their representatives by voting on pressing issues.

Create a "govwatch" program that allows people to enter in geographic and other info and get back information about bills/laws that affect them

Empower individual voters with both online, real-time data on their political representatives' activity, and tools to analyze, engage and influence outcomes

Increase the transparency of laws, eliminate duplicate ones and communicate them better to affected citizens

Share information on how municipalities and states use public funds

Provide quality education to African students

Education

Support efforts to increase young Africans' access to quality education. This idea's many user-submitted inspirations include an initiative to provide quality education and facilities to children who lack access; giving leadership training to outstanding young people who will comprise tomorrow's African leaders; and providing an online networking space for knowledge sharing and collaboration among teachers in Africa.

Provide an online networking space for collaboration and knowledge sharing among teachers in Africa

Help social entrepreneurs drive change

Opportunity

Create a fund to support social entrepreneurship. This idea was inspired by a number of user proposals focused on "social entrepreneurs" -- individuals and organizations who use entrepreneurial techniques to build ventures focused on attacking social problems and fomenting change. Specific relevant ideas include establishing schools that teach entrepreneurial skills in rural areas; supporting entrepreneurs in underdeveloped communities; and creating an entity to provide capital and training to help entrepreneurs build viable businesses and catalyze sustained community change.

Provide targeted capital and business training to help young entrepreneurs build viable businesses and catalyze sustained community change

Create a non-profit, venture capital-like revolving fund to invest in high-impact local entrepreneurs

Send young American entrepreneurs to underdeveloped communities to help create small businesses that would economically benefit those communities

Create schools in rural areas to teach local people how to become entrepreneurs

Create a private equity fund to help immigrants in developed countries finance business development in their countries of origin

Create real-time natural crisis tracking system

Community

Make rapid-response crisis-mapping data available to help policymakers better coordinate response efforts during hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters. For example, this proposal could involve joining with global partners to develop technology to collect high-resolution imagery and video via satellite, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ground-based communications, and display and aggregate this data for the use of policymakers and international organizations tasked with protecting vulnerable civilians.

Use Vertical Takeoff & Landing (VTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in hazardous area detection, life search and rescue, and more

Build better banking tools for everyone

Opportunity

Partner with banks and technology companies to increase the reach of financial services across the world. Users submitted numerous ideas that seek to improve the quality of people's lives by offering new, more convenient and more sophisticated banking services. Specific suggestions include inexpensive village-based banking kiosks for developing countries; an SMS solution geared toward mobile networks; and ideas for implementing banking services into school curriculums.

Enable prepaid cell phone bank accounts for millions of people working in the informal economy

Create a community-level electronic banking system for rural areas

Build IT-enabled kiosks which provide access to financial services

Create a single world bank or supra-national currency, uniform rules and transparent public accounting

Collect and organize the world's urban data

Community

Support efforts to organize, analyze and make accessible online the world's urban and population data. A majority of the global human population lives in cities, and more people continue to migrate into urban centers. Information about the urban planet is ever more invaluable in helping understand humanity's impact on our surroundings, thus empowering citizens and helping leaders make better-informed decisions. Users interested in this area submitted ideas ranging from creating a website where residents can text or upload photos that highlight city issues to building a comprehensive database of city projects and using mobile phones to collect information about, and eventually be able to predict traffic and congestion patterns.

Build a website that enables city residents to submit information to highlight city issues, thereby helping governments understand their citizens' demands

Apply leading-edge web tools to communities and cities to help people participate, document and share solutions to the challenges that their communities face

Place cameras at suitable locations in cities around the world and take daily pictures to provide time-lapse views of urban development

Create a comprehensive, free-access, peer-reviewed online database of various city projects from major cities around the world

Work toward socially conscious tax policies

Environment

Fund the most promising efforts to make the tax system more transparent and better at supporting societal sustainability and development. This idea is inspired by many tax-related ideas from users around the world, including: replacing income taxes with smart consumption taxes; tax discounts for citizens who participate in socially beneficial works; and giving citizens more visibility and control into the allocation of their tax dollars. User ideas in this category highlight tax policy as a perhaps surprisingly fertile area in which intelligent, data-driven analysis could make a huge difference in the effectiveness of the public sector.

Replace all income taxes with an ecological VAT: namely, a smart sales tax on consumption

Create a mechanism that serves consumers'/citizens' interests by applying externality cost/benefit analysis to systematically adjust market forces in vital sectors like energy, housing and the environment

Work to encourage the Brazil vehicle tax to release a portion of its revenues for projects to neutralize carbon emissions

Encourage people to participate in charities and other socially beneficial works by providing tax discounts

Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists

Education

Support groups and programs that promote positive depictions of engineers and scientists in popular media. Generally speaking, career services are only offered in earnest during university years, when many opportunities have already passed by. These proposals are designed to encourage more young people to pursue careers in this field by supporting groups that work toward encouraging positive images of engineering and science in pop culture. Our users submitted a number of suggestions for making engineering and science "cool," including online libraries of "day-in-the-life of an engineer" videos, an online channel devoted entirely to IT news, live performances with massive robots, and telling inspirational real-life stories about how individual engineers and scientists have changed the world. This proposal will require finding the right public advocacy groups to partner with in pursuing these objectives.

Create a tech channel that broadcasts coverage of conferences and news about the web and Internet technology

Generate excitement and curiosity in science by developing fantastic live presentations in science theaters

Develop an online multimedia library that describes a wide variety of careers through compelling stories in short video interviews, documentaries and day-in-the-life vignettes

Enhance science and engineering education

Education

Support initiatives that enhance young people's engineering and science education. Users from many countries agreed that encouraging science education was an ideal way to ensure the brightest future for technology development itself. Specific ideas ranged from building a virtual science lab and a live multiplayer math game to putting Lego robots and local high-tech professionals in schools.

Build a virtual science lab to enable students without sufficient access to proper facilities to run, trial and test virtual experiments

Ensure that youth have access to Legos, robots, computers etc. in school environments

Recruit local technology professionals to work with students at local schools

Create an academically oriented multiplayer game focused on math and science

Create real-world issue reporting system

Community

Build an issue-reporting website that lets people report problems to proper authorities. When software testers find errors, they generally submit them to a tool which automatically routes them to the right team to be fixed. Implementing proposals for this idea might involve creating an analogous system for the real world that lets anyone report a problem of any kind (e.g., a dangerous pothole), and routes problems it deems sufficiently important to the proper authorities (e.g., the relevant road agency). The aim would be to incorporate all the niche applications that users suggested, including reporting crimes to the police and environmental issues to local governments.

Create a one-stop shop for anyone wanting to find any service anywhere

Promote health monitoring and data analysis

Health

Predict and minimize medical problems and emergencies through real-time tracking of individuals' health data and analysis of historical data. Several ideas submitted in multiple languages recommend this concept, offering various ideas about which types of monitors and devices to use; which vital signs to measure (with varying levels of invasiveness); which diseases and conditions to track; and so on. The idea could work both in the developed world (through wearable, mobile or in-home devices) and in the developing world (via publicly accessible locations and devices), and the data could be used both to track individuals' health status and to spot community trends and prevent disease outbreaks.

Create an integrated personal health data system that uses data collected from toilets to transmit and analyze health and nutritional data

Use a bracelet device to measure blood pressure, temperature, etc. to detect health changes and track trends at a regional and national level

Create an affordable, wearable, nearly invisible device that people could use to effortlessly monitor physical health data, then broadcast it to authorized individuals they have selected.

Design a portable doctor or handheld health monitoring system

Create genocide monitoring and alert system

Community

Build and refine tools capable of disseminating genocide-related mapping and related information in order to save lives. Much of the necessary technology and data-gathering methodology already exists both for general crisis mapping and for early warning systems capable of preventing mass atrocities. A key remaining step is to make this data more widely available to strengthen international aid agency coordination, improve resource allocation, develop timely policy and help evaluate current humanitarian practices.

Reduce conflict, specifically crimes against humanity, by aggregating data, including pertinent statistics, the history and geography of specific conflicts, local cultures, geostrategic interests, and recent developments that can help policymakers identify emerging crises more effectively

Support the creation of an independent global genocide watchdog that can trigger existing laws and guarantee immediate intervention

Drive innovation in public transport

Energy

Develop new transportation technologies to help move more people with less energy, greater efficiency and fewer casualties. Millions of people still use methods of transportation invented a hundred or more years ago. Even small improvements in speed, safety, cost and environmental efficiency would have a large impact on people's lives, and on the planet as a whole. With such improvements in mind, transportation-minded users submitted ideas ranging from a hydrogen-powered bicycle to an airship optimized for commuter travel. By aligning with and supporting organizations that share these goals, this proposal aims to drive innovation in this sector and make the best of these ideas a reality.

Design a community light rail system for use by bicycles and minimum-powered vehicles

Build a rail car system that adapts fuel cars to also run on electric railway networks

Create a transportation system that enables electric cars to run on a rail-type system

Promote bicycle commuting via more efficient bike safety systems

Design electric bicycles powered by hydrogen or methanol fuel cells

Build airships for public transport

Make educational content available online for free

Education

Make educational and course materials more accessible online to students worldwide. Lots of educational content is not indexed or accessible on the public web. Various users have proposed finding ways to help content owners put formerly exclusive content online, including offline materials (lectures, textbooks, videotaped workshops) and limited-access materials (scholarly papers, research dissertations); help teachers themselves become more available online (access to online profs, 24/7 homework help, cross-country study groups); and to make all this material and academic help accessible through both computer and mobile platforms.

Collaborate with top schools around the world to make their lectures freely accessible online

Create an online educational platform that provides free training and education as part of a worldwide, officially accepted degree

Provide free online lectures and textbooks for every subject and grade level

Facilitate information exchange among students around the world, including cross-country "study groups" on specific topics

Build real-time, user-reported news service

Everything Else

Help people find and report timely, important local information. Users have submitted many ideas proposing better access to locally relevant info, including real-time news (fires, natural disasters and road accidents), disease tracking (mobile devices that track people's health status) and personal incidents (calling to report a threatening criminal situation, natural disaster or medical emergency). Implementation of this idea would involve creating a system that enables ordinary citizens to easily report news that's happening around them, from meaningful local events to important global stories.

Create more efficient landmine removal programs

Shelter

Fund global organizations that are developing efficient strategies for landmine detection and removal. Landmines remain a significant global problem. There are an estimated 110 million landmines still active in 70 countries; they have been blamed for over 5,000 casualties annually, ~70% of which are civilians, and nearly half of those are children.* Effective new landmine-removal programs offer a wide range of societal benefits beyond the obvious development of mine-free areas, including the repatriation of refugees and better distribution of emergency aid. Numerous suggestions for this topic include robotic, human and animal-facilitated detection strategies. *www.icbl.org

O'Reilly, Kelly can't keep basic facts straight on phony New Black Panthers story Discussing Justice Department lawyer Christopher Coates' testimony on the phony New Black Panthers Party scandal, Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly pushed claims that the case shows the Obama administration's Justice Department is "not interested" in protecting white voters from discrimination. But their claims were riddled with falsehoods and misrepresentations. Read More

Fox whopper: DOJ said Voting Rights Act wasn't violated in New Black Panthers case Reporting on Justice Department lawyer Christopher Coates testimony on the phony New Black Panthers Party scandal, Fox News falsely reported that the Justice Department had "determined that the Voting Rights Act... had not been violated" in the case. In fact, the Obama administration's DOJ obtained default judgment against one of the defendants on the basis of his violation of that law.Read More

"[T]his so-called investigation is thin on facts and evidence and thick on rhetoric," Tracy Schmaler, a DOJ spokeswoman told TPMMuckraker in an e-mail. She added it was important to place Coates' testimony in the context of the "politicization that occurred in the Civil Rights Division in the previous administration."

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is controlled by Republican appointees. But one George W. Bush appointee, Commissioner Abigail Thernstrom, has said the investigation was driven by her colleagues' fantasies of using the issue to topple Holder and the Obama administration.........................

Don't blame me, I "vote[d]" for the unqualified "flake" with the "checkered background" Right-wing media figures have called GOP senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell "a bit of a flake," not "qualified as [a] leader," and someone with a "checkered background" who does not "evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character." Nevertheless, these media figures have endorsed O'Donnell because, in the words of Karl Rove: "I'm for the Republicans in each and every case." Read More

Memo to right-wing media: Military brass supports Obama's Afghanistan strategy Right-wing media outlets have seized on leaked excerpts of Bob Woodward's upcoming book to suggest that President Obama has followed a strategy in Afghanistan that his generals think is folly. In fact, top Pentagon personnel, including Gen. David Petraeus, Adm. Mike Mullen, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have stated that they agree with Obama's Afghanistan strategy. Read More

Can't right-wing bloggers read a (lunar) calendar? Right wing blogs were forced to issue humiliating updates after their most recent fake story -- that the Israeli delegation had rejected President Obama by "skip[ping]" his speech to the United Nations -- completely dissolved. In fact, the Israeli delegation was absent because they were observing the Jewish holiday Sukkot.Read More

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Sen. Chambliss's office has determined that yep, it was one of his staffers who posted the "All Fa--ots Must Die" comment on the Joe.My.God website just after Senate Republicans prevented a vote on repealing DADT.

Fox double standard: Obama needs to abide by military's requests, Bush does not Fox News personalities have repeatedly attacked President Obama for purportedly not sending as many troops to Afghanistan as the military requested. However, when then-President Bush dismissed Gen. Shinseki's recommendation that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed in Iraq, Fox virtually ignored the story and, when it did cover it, hosted a contributor to suggest that critics "shut up and let daddy drive."Read More

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Right-wing media shocked to learn that DOJ attorneys send email to each other Media conservatives claim that the existence of communication between Justice Department attorneys proves that department officials lied when they said that career attorneys and not political appointees decided not to pursue additional charges against members of the New Black Panther Party. In fact, DOJ officials have said repeatedly that political appointees were made aware of the decision-making process. Read More

Fox & Friends attack the DREAM ActFox & Friends attacked a bill establishing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and who enroll in college or enlist in the military, and criticized its placement in a defense spending bill. However, military experts agree that it would strengthen the military, and Republicans have previously added non-military legislation to defense bills. Read More

Fox & Limbaugh: Bush deficits good, Obama deficits bad Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have repeatedly criticized President Obama for supposedly being responsible for huge deficits. However, both recently attempted to defend former President Bush's policy of not paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars or his tax cuts. Read More

Toronto Sun corrects Soros-Nazi smear The Toronto Sun issued a correction to a column they recently published claiming that George Soros, as a child, "collaborated with the Nazis." This smear has long been popular among conservatives attacking Soros for his support of progressive causes. Read More

General Motors recently announced that, thanks to federal efforts to keep the American auto industry from going under, it would be able to rehire 483 workers at its Spring Hill, Tennessee plant to manufacture “three variants of Ecotec four-cylinder engines.” The $438 million arrangement will start producing engines for the Buick, Chevrolet, and GMC models by 2011.

As auto blog Jalopnik reports, the plant recently held a ceremony to welcome back the new workers to begin production of the Ecotec engines. Attending the ceremony were three local Republican legislators, Sens. Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn. Ironically, all three of these lawmakers opposed the plans to save General Motors and other U.S. auto companies. This didn’t stop Corker from taking credit for the federal rescue, anyway. At the event he claimed he “contributed to strengthening the auto industry in this country.” Jalopnik reports that “irony of the Republican lawmakers’ presence wasn’t lost on the workers who attended the ceremony; they booed Tennessee Republican Bob Corker”:

Happy days came back Friday to Spring Hill, Tenn., when General Motors announced it would rehire 483 laid-off workers to build four-cylinder engines.On hand to cheer the news: Three Republican lawmakers who opposed the bailout that saved GM.

As part of its $50 billion bankruptcy arranged by the Obama administration, GM shuttered the Spring Hill plant’s assembly line last year, shedding 2,000 jobs in the process, but kept building four-cylinder engines. The new plan calls for $483 million in spending to upgrade the engine line, pending a deal on state incentives.

The irony of the Republican lawmakers’ presence wasn’t lost on the workers who attended the ceremony; they booed Tennessee Republican Bob Corker, and one UAW official made clear from the stage that the union still remembered which politicians had voted to rescue Wall Street but opposed an auto industry bailout.

Jalopnik goes on to note that when the auto industry rescue was being negotiated, Corker was speaking very differently about federal efforts to revive GM. At the time, Corker said that the Obama administration “has decided they know better than our courts and our free market process how to deal with these companies. … This is a major power grab.”

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Surprise! Yes, the Top 10 is back for a special limited run. I'll be checking in with weekly editions between now and the elections on November 2 -- so let's get started! This week The GOP (1) has created a storm in a teacup, which has only gotten stronger thanks to the shenanigans of Christine O'Donnell (2,3). Elsewhere, Sean Hannity (6) is up to his usual tricks, Newt Gingrich (7) is a racist, and Mitch McConnell (8) knows who the real victims of the recession are.

With his recent criticisms of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell on Fox News, Karl Rove kicked up a controversy. His critique of O'Donnell was granular and well-informed. Having worked with Karl for a number of years, I know that he is nothing if not detail-oriented. Rove has taken O'Donnell to task for her checkered financial past, her history of litigiousness and paranoia, her misleading statements about her educational background. These facts may not be disqualifying for office, but they indicate a flawed, inexperienced, perennial candidate on the model of Alan Keyes.

While Rove's critique was tough, the reaction in parts of the conservative blogosphere has been unhinged. Michelle Malkin wrote that it "might as well have been Olbermann on MSNBC." Mark Levin pronounced Rove at "war against the Tea Party movement and conservatives." "In terms of the conservative movement," wrote Dan Riehl, "we should not simply ignore him, but proactively work to undermine Rove in whatever ways we can, given his obvious willingness to undermine us."

This reaction is revealing -- and disturbing -- for a number of reasons.

First, it shows how some conservatives view the business of political commentary. Rove obviously has strong views on O'Donnell, based on personal experience with the candidate. But deviations from the party line are not permitted. It is not enough to dispute Rove's critique; Rove himself must be punished. The message is clear: The facts do not matter. Politics is war carried on by other means. Anyone who doesn't consistently take one side is a traitor.

This attitude can be found on right and left. But a serious commentator cannot think this way. He owes his readers or viewers his best judgment -- which means he cannot simply be a tool of someone else's ideological agenda. Some conservatives have adopted the Bolshevik approach to information and the media: Every personal feeling, every independent thought, every inconvenient fact, must be subordinated to the party line -- the Tea Party line.

Second, the ferocity of this criticism indicates a growing arrogance. Tea Party purists, on the Internet and elsewhere, clearly believe their ascendance makes other elements of the conservative movement unnecessary. But victory in a Republican primary electorate of 60,000 is Delaware does not make the Tea Party movement predominant in the Republican Party, or even in the conservative movement. If Tea Party activists believe they can win in a political coalition so pure that it doesn't include strong, mainstream conservatives such as Karl Rove, they are delusional. And they are hurting their own cause.

Third, some conservatives seem to display special venom for those who are "compromised" by the experience of actually winning and governing. Rove, according to Malkin, is an "establishment Beltway strategist." Actually, he is a former high-level policy aid to the president of the United States and the primary author of two presidential victories. This does not make him always right. But it means he has had responsibilities bigger than running a Web site. This is an advantage for a commentator, not a drawback.

In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification. People like O'Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven't been tainted by public trust or actual achievement. This is the attitude of the adolescent -- the belief that the world began on their thirteenth birthday. It is also a sign of childish political thought.

"The Constitution provides enumerated powers," answered Miller. "I guess my challenge is to anybody that asks, show me the enumerated power. And then look at the 10th Amendment that says if it's not done in the Constitution, it's a power that belongs to the state and the people."

Miller said, "I think we as a people need to stop being disingenuous about what the Constitution provides for. It does not provide for this all-encompassing power that we've seen exercised for last several decades."..............................

Way back in February, a right-wing group called Tea Party Nation organized its first national event, hosting a convention in Nashville. It wasn't especially well attended -- despite paying former half-term Gov. Sarah Palin (R) a reported $100,000, only about 600 people showed up.

So, organizers decided to give it another shot, scheduling the National Tea Party Unity convention for July. Just two weeks before its kickoff, organizers announced that the Unity event had been postponed until October 14.

Of course, that's less than a month away. How's the event shaping up? As Raven Brooks discovered, it's not.

[M]y first stop was a Google search to find their web site. I found it, but this link should speak for itself. Check out nationalteapartyconvention.com. Oh you got a page not found error? Well there's nothing wrong with your browser, the site doesn't exist anymore. And there's absolutely zero media or blog coverage of the event since they announced the dates were changing. Not really what you'd expect for an event featuring Sharron Angle, Lou Dobbs, Joseph Farah, and Andrew Breitbart is it?

Well it gets better. I wanted to make sure the convention really was canceled and they weren't just having web issues or neglected to do any PR for their event. So I put in a call to the Mirage hotel and asked if I could book a room in their block for the event. Turns out the room block had been canceled and the Mirage had no record of the event.

In other words, it's another bust. Tea Party Nation has now tried three times to organize a national convention for activists, and it's failed three times.

I think the larger lesson here is that there is such a thing as too many gatherings. This so-called "movement" has no formal leadership, structure, agenda, or membership -- which in turn makes organizing kind of tricky -- but it keeps scheduling event after event. Some are billed as Tea Party rallies, while others are just rallies for Tea Partiers, but looking back over the last 17 months or so, the number of get-togethers intended to be national in scope has to be well over a dozen.

Is it any wonder that gathering fatigue has set in? I've never even heard of a movement trying to organize so many national events in such close proximity to one another, and actually expecting folks to show up.

Right-wing media falsely claim LA spent "a couple million" in stimulus "per job" created Right-wing media have seized on a recent Los Angeles audit of some stimulus funds the city has received to falsely claim that each stimulus-funded job in LA cost the taxpayer an average of $2 million per job. In fact, the controller's office noted that not all of the funds have been spent yet, additional jobs are expected, and moreover, such cost-per-job estimates are "highly misleading," as they do not capture the full impact of the stimulus. Read More

On October 30, 2010, Jon and The Daily Show will lead the first-ever Rally to Restore Sanity on the National Mall in Washington D.C. — a movement of "people who have been too busy to go to rallies" — to beg America to stop shouting, throwing and drawing Hitler mustaches on people other than Hitler (or Charlie Chaplin).

Not to be outdone, The Colbert Nation is calling on all freedom-loving patriots to challenge The Daily Show's dark, optimistic forces by marching on the Mall at the same time to help Keep Fear Alive.

Which side are you on? Visit the rally pages and declare your allegiance!

Fox & Friends' class war marches onFox & Friends worked overtime on its September 16 broadcast to "spin" the proposed extension of the middle class tax cuts into "a tax hike" for the wealthiest Americans, by making a series of false and baseless claims. Read More

Memo to Forbes: D'Souza's "facts" are indeed in contention In a September 9 Forbes cover story that has been praised by Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck, Dinesh D'Souza asserts that President Obama's policies should be understood as a manifestation of his African father's "hatred of the colonial system." Forbes has said it "stands by the story" and that "no facts are in contention," but D'Souza's article contains numerous falsehoods and distortions. Read More

Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell has previously sounded the alarm against cloning and stem-cell research -- and what she's described as the current terror of human-mouse hybrids.

We previously noted that O'Donnell had attacked her primary opponent, Congressman Mike Castle, based on his support for stem-cell research. But it turns out that her interest in the subject goes back much further. As Little Green Footballs has spotted, O'Donnell appeared in 2007 on The O'Reilly Factor, to speak out against such research in response to the cloning of some monkeys. Then came her warning on human-mouse hybrids.

"They are -- they are doing that here in the United States. American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment."

It's possible that O'Donnell was misremembering this 2005 report on scientists who successfully grew human brain cells within mice -- which is not the same as an actual functioning human brain, but a demonstration that human brain cells can be made from stem cells.

However, there is also some other stunning video evidence proving O'Donnell's dire warnings, and the potential terrible consequences for not only America, but indeed the whole world.....................................

The tax plan put forward this week by Republican leaders in Congress would add nearly $4 trillion to the national debt and would be offset only by a $300 billion spending freeze, a Washington Post analysis states.

While the cost of the Tax Hike Prevention Act of 2010 hasn't been calculated yet, the Post reports that a similar but "slightly more expensive" plan analyzed by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office found it would cost $3.9 trillion over 10 years, making it roughly four times as expensive as the Democrats' health reforms, which will cost less than $1 trillion over the same period.

The Republican tax bill, introduced this week by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), aims to prevent the Democratic-controlled Congress from letting the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 expire. The tax reductions will expire at the end of the year if they are not extended.

The Post notes that an accompanying spending freeze proposed by McConnell would save $300 billion, which the newspaper describes as a "drop in the bucket" compared to the cost of the tax cut extension.

The plan's hefty price tag, coming at a time when many in the Republican grassroots are growing alarmed about skyrocketing budget deficits, has provided the Democrats with fuel for the mid-term elections, as they seek to paint the GOP as dishonest or hypocritical when claiming to be the party of fiscal responsibility...............